Under Attack

Exactly one year ago, it became real.

It’s important to think of it that way: January 6, 2021, was a moment in time, but it was not isolated. There was a lead-up, and there was follow-up, and there is an unwritten future. But January 6 was when the stakes were made clear: Democracy is truly under attack. The threat is real, and it will include violence when necessary.

That attack continues. Oliver Knox of the Washington Post on Monday noted that the attempted interruption of a peaceful transfer of power after a lawful election, an attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the gears to allow a losing candidate to keep power — an insurrection by any definition of the word — cannot be whitewashed, and its effects were not limited to a single terrible day. “How Americans understand Trump’s months-long, falsehood-fueled campaign to overturn the 2020 election, ultimately calling on supporters to march on the Capitol a year ago, remains a clear and present force shaping U.S. politics,” Knox wrote.

The South Fork has a stake in this discussion more than some communities, because our U.S. representative, Lee Zeldin, played an outsize role in the insurrection. He was joined by well over 100 Republican colleagues in challenging the certification, but he was one of the few to rise on the House floor — just hours after violence spilled into the same space — to take up Donald Trump’s “Big Lie.” His remarks that day weaved tales of election fraud that were never rooted in reality. Some, like the idea that the number of absentee ballots cast in Pennsylvania had exceeded the number of registered voters, had been debunked before he repeated the lie that day. The rest evaporated upon closer inspection.

“I have a duty to speak out about confirmed, evidence-filled issues with the administration of the 2020 presidential election in certain battleground states,” Zeldin said on the House floor one year ago, as broken glass littered and blood stained the Capitol. In the 12 months since, every court and every investigation found the “Big Lie” to be just that. Lee Zeldin was wrong — and he should mark the anniversary by admitting it.

But he won’t. Now a Republican candidate for governor — it’s a topsy-turvy moment in American history when taking part in a failed insurrection earns you a promotion — Zeldin has never addressed the subject adequately, not once. He’s deftly avoided the topic in every interview on every right-wing television network, and in every major state news outlet covering the gubernatorial campaign. He flatly refuses to answer questions, any questions, from this newspaper organization about that day one year ago, whether the past year has changed his perspective, or any other subject.

His predecessor in the seat, Southampton’s Tim Bishop, said last January that the insurrectionists’ anger “was rooted in a lie that was repeated over and over and over.” The Republican legislators, like Zeldin, who later took up the cause on the House floor and voted not to accept the results “gave credence to that lie,” he said.

One year later, more than half of Republicans label what happened on January 6, 2021, as “defending freedom,” the Washington Post reported. A third of Americans say they aren’t confident about this year’s midterm election results. Which was the point of the “Big Lie”: to attack democracy at its foundation. These numbers suggest it has succeeded.

But it can’t. “Every Day Is January 6 Now” read the title of the New Year’s Day editorial in The New York Times. Remember it not as an isolated event but as the day the mask was peeled back and the truth was revealed. “A republic, if you can keep it” is how Benjamin Franklin once described America. That remains an open question, one we have to begin answering once and for all.